


To All of My Beloved

by bellezza



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-09-27
Packaged: 2018-02-19 00:57:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2368364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellezza/pseuds/bellezza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do not stand at my grave and cry;<br/>I am not there. I did not die.--</p><p>The Tower of Salvation is a burial ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To All of My Beloved

**Author's Note:**

> Short Colette character study inspired by a replay of Symphonia and the monumentally creepy interior decorating job Mithos did in the Tower of Salvation.

Sound is painful, these days. When she lays her hand on the oracle stone and the door to the Tower grates open, she can feel it in her bones. It sounds like a funeral drum. Light pours out, tinged an incandescent green. Not like the green of sunlight through tree leaves, but a sickly green, ominous and forbidding. If she could feel nausea still, she’s sure she’d be nauseous now. This is it. This is the end.

She steps through the door.

Her eyes, more sensitive as well for weeks now, adjust quickly to the strange light to take in the vast, impossible emptiness of the Tower’s belly, flecked by strange dark stars surrounding the stairs that climb up into heaven. The path laid out before her feet is transparent, and for one wild moment she thinks, _I’m going to fall_ , and then she realizes how silly that thought is because she has wings. There is no more falling, from here on out: there is only ascending.

She squares her shoulders and puts her foot on the first step, and that’s when she realizes what the shapes orbiting her are. Spiraling out around her, beneath her feet and reaching far above her head and on into forever, are hundreds upon hundreds of dark, floating coffins.

All at once, she feels herself beginning to tremble. Is this what will become of her, if she fails? Is this what will become of Lloyd, of Genis and Professor Sage and Sheena? How many Chosen are laid to rest here in this cold, empty space, so far removed from the light and joy of the world? So many dead, stretching back through the years, centuries of loss and sacrifice and heartache.

Kratos rests his hand on her shoulder, and she feels it but she does not feel it—it's a sort of pressure, like being covered by a blanket, but the warmth, the heavy, measured strength, none of that is there. She turns into the curve of his hand and feels ashamed that he can feel her shaking.

“Are you alright, Chosen One?” His voice has a timbre to it she’s found comforting since she met him, a dark silhouette with its sword raised in her defense; there’s something about his voice that feels familiar, feels right. He’s grown sharper the past few days as their journey has drawn to a close, and she thinks she understands why. She can see it in his eyes: anticipation, and a drive for her to reach this journey’s end no mercenary should rightly have. But even in that, she finds comfort in his voice still.

It’s enough. She manages a smile—and if it’s only a weak and fluttering one that does not reach her eyes, no matter, because there's no one here she has to fool. She does not think of the bodies, and she does not imagine herself in one of those coffins, suspended in emptiness for eternity.

Instead she thinks of Raine, alight with passion but gentle as she’d been last night, when she’d brushed Colette’s hair one final time even though Colette couldn’t feel it. She thinks of Genis, eager at her delight, with sunshine overhead and cream and strawberries bursting on her tongue. She thinks of Sheena under a starry sky with a campfire crackling between them, and her tender, honest eyes.

Most of all, she thinks of Lloyd, his hand caught between both of hers as she traced letters onto his palm, and the warmth she’d imagined there after she’d lost all sense for it.

She pulls away and climbs the stairway into heaven, to the altar of her sacrifice, to benediction and rebirth. 


End file.
